ABSTRACT
The political parties in Europe can be typologically classified in a great variety of ways. The following classifications are based on Maurice Duverger’s ideas.1 In an organizational typology, a distinction is first made between membership parties and voters’ parties. Both correspond to the integrational mass party type that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The deciding criterion for whether a party is a membership party or a voters’ party is the density of the organization: the greater the proportion of followers bound to the party in an organized way, the more such a party corresponds to the membership party type. A second distinction concerns parties with claims to represent specific groups and standpoints and those whose representation is of a more general nature. Further distinctions can be made in the group of parties representing specific interests, between class-based parties and confessional parties or those based on a philosophical premise. Parties with claims to general representation are basically people’s parties, whose claims to represent the entire electorate justify the term catch-all party.
